I don't think versioning the vocabularies included in Factor is necessary.  You 
don't see versions in standard libraries of other languages.  However, it would 
be nice if released versions of Factor reported their version numbers properly.


On Aug 27, 2011, at 12:32 PM, "Matt Gushee" <m...@gushee.net> wrote:

> Hi, all--
> 
> I'm wondering what the Factor community would think of including certain
> kinds of metadata in the source code for vocabularies and for the Factor
> itself.
> 
> My starting point for this line of thinking was that I had played with
> Factor for a while a couple of years ago, then dropped it for a while
> ... and I wanted to know what version I had installed. So my first
> thought was to go to the listener and try
> 
>  version
> 
> Nope. Okay, how about
> 
>  factor-version
> 
> ? No again. And so on through several variations ... nothing. Nor could
> I find anything in the online help. Nor any file in the source directory
> to indicate the version (or revision date). And it occurs to now, which
> should be obvious, that I can probably use Git to find out some
> pertinent info. However:
> 
> * Not everyone is using Git.
> 
> * Version info is useful, not just for the purpose I mentioned, but
> also for debugging.
> 
> * It seems desirable to be able to query version info via the listener,
> and probably also programatically
>   for the purpose of checking dependencies among vocabularies.
> 
> Furthermore, there is probably other metadata that would be a good idea
> to maintain. For example, if Factor becomes widely used, there might be
> a situation where different developers distribute similarly- or
> identically-named vocabularies. So we should have the developer's name,
> or email address, or some other identifier that serves to distinguish a
> given vocabulary from a different one with the same name.
> 
> Personally, I feel pretty strongly about this; if I were in charge of
> development I would make at least the above-mentioned items *mandatory*
> for all language components, such that a vocabulary would fail to load
> or compile if it didn't include the required metadata. But I think I've
> said enough. I will leave it up to more experienced folks to decide
> whether and how to implement this idea. Thanks for reading!
> 
> -- 
> Matt Gushee
> m...@gushee.net
> 
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